"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

kenada said:

I elaborate a bit more in post #69. Yes, silly (or out of tone) replies can be regulated through the social contract: we agreed to play a game with X tone, and the GM is screwing that up by being (too, not enough, etc) silly. It’s well-meaning but inappropriate responses that are the problem. I gave some examples of that at the end of my original post. However, I do wish Ron Edwards had named the game, so we could judge the move for ourselves.

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If you're talking about being watched from the shadows, it's Monsterhearts.

thefutilist said:

If you're talking about being watched from the shadows, it's Monsterhearts.

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Is that 1e? I only have 2e, and my search isn’t turning up anything.

kenada said:

Is that 1e? I only have 2e, and my search isn’t turning up anything.

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I can’t get to my copy of 1e at the moment but it’s also possible I’ve gone crazy. There’s a small chance I mixed it up with the run away move (run into something worse) which has the same problems. Anyway I’ll look through 1e tomorrow for my own sanity because I was sure it was Monsterhearts.

As an aside: I think the problem Narrativist games had is that there was widespread drift away from conflict resolution into ‘a thing happens.’ I could rant at length about that but it’s a massive tangent.

thefutilist said:

I can’t get to my copy of 1e at the moment but it’s also possible I’ve gone crazy. There’s a small chance I mixed it up with the run away move (run into something worse) which has the same problems. Anyway I’ll look through 1e tomorrow for my own sanity because I was sure it was Monsterhearts.

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Monsterhearts isn’t unconstrained though. The conversation is supposed work like it does in Apocalypse World. I can see how a move like Run Away could be mishandled, but that’s on the MC.

thefutilist said:

As an aside: I think the problem Narrativist games had is that there was widespread drift away from conflict resolution into ‘a thing happens.’ I could rant at length about that but it’s a massive tangent.

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I think Ron Edwards is making good points about authority and constraints, but he needs to use actual examples not hypotheticals or incomplete/misunderstood ones.

Thomas Shey said:

While I think Edwards had some serious hyperbole here, I think its pretty defensible that most of the design of Vampire was relatively trad with nothing leading to the kind of game it claimed to want, and a single system--Humanity--bolted on to lean toward that. That meant that in practice, for a lot of people they were trying to play a different game than the one it avowedly was, and just working around Humanity as best they could to do so.

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Looking at it from here, this game was an utter disaster. So much so that the authors' response was "well, system doesn't matter, just ignore all the rules!" Of course Edwards panned it, what good is there to say of such a system? People may have had a great time playing V:tM, I'm sure many did, but it wasn't because of anything in the game itself. My take on it, from my experience of that time period, was that the RPG hobby was in kind of one of its periodic downturns. People were getting tired of D&D, TSR seemed to have nothing much to offer, and the whole Vampire/Urban Fantasy wave was strong. It was just at the tail end of the whole Anne Rice craze, Vampires was a huge thing, and so WW hit at a great moment for them. Had they had the design chops to actually build a decent game, who knows what might have happened? Well, they didn't, the moment kind of faded, WotC bought TSR eventually and did something at least moderately interesting with it, enough to get people playing again, and OGL plus fairly mature DTP brought on a wave of newer games.

I do think V:tM did some things that have had positive benefits ultimately. It certainly showed that the Hickmanesque elevation of meta-plot and DM-driven story has serious limits and flaws. It showed that system DOES actually matter, beyond any reasonable argument, and kind of kicked off the whole discussion that eventually lead to modern Narrativist play. Heck, I don't doubt that, with the right Storyteller and the right set of players, V:tM was fun. Lots of people had fun with Dragonlance too, up to a point. I think that branch of RPG design showed us that there was real power in RPGs, that the 'West Coast Crowd' was not wrong back in the early days, they just hadn't got an advanced enough theory to do what modern Narrativist games do today.

Emberashh said:

I suggest you read "Theory of Fun" by Raph Koster. It explains in detail why games are a form of art.

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And if one does not accept this as authoritative?

A better description would probably be "argues that games are a form of art." That doesn't carry the connotation of necessary correctness.

Fifth Element said:

And if one does not accept this as authoritative?

A better description would probably be "argues that games are a form of art." That doesn't carry the connotation of necessary correctness.

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It does look like an intereesting book. I'm well past my MMO days, though, and rarely play computer games of any kind any more.

kenada said:

My understanding is it’s way behind the state of the art for other kinds of games, particularly video games. There’s a bunch of ideas out there, but you how to sift through stuff that’s promoting a particular style of play to get to the good stuff, and the number of applied examples is small (e.g., Baker was surprised at how long it took for people to drift away from the core Apocalypse World formula even though a lot of what it does is not strictly necessary in his view to be a PbtA game).

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This is what astounds me a lot with PbtA (and now FitD, I guess).

"Ooh, Bakers made a game where you always have something someone else wants and want something someone else has! Let's reskin it into a cozy game about running a catboy cafe without changing much".

And then everyone makes a surprise pikachu face when a drowning machine makes you drown.

kenada said:

I’m not trying to suggest those games are bad, but when Baker is surprised at how long it took until someone designed a PbtA game that doesn’t use playbooks, that tells me there’s a lot of space left to explore just in that particular class of games. From my perspective, I want to see people push things even further. Having different designs helps demonstrate that different ideas are okay, and sometimes they have good ideas worth incorporating.

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I ####ing wish.

Swords under the Sun is by far my worst game. Literally every game I made afterwards is more innovative and has better ideas.

Too bad my worst game is the only one that sees any traffic because it's attached to the whole Forged in the Dark thingie.

Fifth Element said:

And if one does not accept this as authoritative?

A better description would probably be "argues that games are a form of art." That doesn't carry the connotation of necessary correctness.

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I'd just call that childish.

There's better ways to communicate disagreement than trying to position something as lesser than it is.

loverdrive said:

This is what astounds me a lot with PbtA (and now FitD, I guess).

"Ooh, Bakers made a game where you always have something someone else wants and want something someone else has! Let's reskin it into a cozy game about running a catboy cafe without changing much".

And then everyone makes a surprise pikachu face when a drowning machine makes you drown.

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Yeah, this is the fundamentally frustrating bit. There's been excellent design progress towards one or two very specific goals... And then it gets treated as a mandate to pursue those goals, because they produced innovation the one time, instead of an object lesson in doing good design for your goals.